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Scientists create hottest substance on Earth

The state of matter called a quark gluon plasma existed in the milliseconds after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, smashed heavy lead ions together at close to the speed of light.

They generated temperatures of more than 1.6 trillion degrees Celsius, 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

In the process they recreated the densest material ever observed - only black holes are denser.

The results - released at the Quark Matter Conference recently held in Annecy, France - allows scientists to understand the evolution of the early universe recreating the conditions that existed back then.

One of the fundamental building blocks of matter, called quarks, are bound together by gluons to form 'composite' subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons.

But in its infancy, just microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense these quarks and gluons existed freely and unbound.

The new results confirm that quark gluon plasma acts almost like a fluid, with minimal viscosity.

The results are based on analysis of data collected during the last two weeks of the 2010 LHC run, when the atom smasher switched from colliding hydrogen protons to lead-ions.

The LHC heavy-ion program builds on experiments conducted more than a decade earlier at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator, which saw hints that a quark gluon plasma could be created and studied in the laboratory.

Then, in 1999, the US Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider established that a quark gluon plasma could be created on a minuscule scale.

Professor Geoffrey Taylor, from the University of Melbourne and part of the scientific team involved with the Large Hadron Collider's Atlas Detector, describes the work as an amazing achievement.

"This state of matter doesn't exist anywhere naturally on Earth and is thought to only now occur during the collision of two neutron stars," he said.

"This will help our understanding of the dynamics of the astrophysical processes taking place as a star collapses.

"Looking at how particle jets and subatomic particles like W and Z bosons are created in heavy lead ion collisions compared to lighter hydrogen proton collisions gives us an insight into the conditions that existed in a quark gluon plasma when the universe was just milliseconds old."

Professor Taylor says the results were accomplished in just two weeks of atom smashing.

"These collisions are also generating antimatter, which will help us try to understand why we live in a stable universe of matter when equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the big bang," he said.

"It takes our understanding of things that are happening in the cosmos one step further."

Wow ! That is something, but I can't help thinking about Gil Scott-Heron's song "Whitey's on the Moon", did you ever hear it ? LoL ~ I can't afford to buy food, taxes are up, can't pay my rent, and Whitey's on the Moon !

Well, in my humble opinion, there have been so many nails (they're falling on the floor) in the coffin of religion going way back to Galileo, so by now you would have thought that there has been so much evidence presented to everybody that it's a wonder that people still believe religious bullshit, its amazing just how ignorant some people chose to be ?

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."ObamaCheck out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under BrianJames Rational Poet also on twitter under Brianrrs37

way we keep expanding our knowledge into areas 'god does not want us to know'. It's a cool finding - just wish there was some way we could project back pre-bang or detect the presence of the universe next door, or find a universe in a black hole or something. Yeah, I know. All a bit silly. But it would be pretty wild to get even a hint of something more...

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck

Well Brian, several years ago I had to replace the gasket on my fridge but before I did, I pulled it back while the door was shut just to answer the age old question about whether the light goes out or not. Trust me on this:

THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT MORTAL MAN WAS NEVER MEANT TO KNOW...

OK, bad 50's sci-fi tag line aside, the QGP is really pretty cool. As the article says, they have been making it at the RHIC (which happens to be about 20 miles from where I live) for nearly a dozen years now.

A laboratory sample of QGP does not have the density to form a gravitational black hole but it can form an equivalent structure of the strong nuclear force. So all the fears about the LHC making a black hole never really amounted to anything because, by analogy, we have been making them in the laboratory for quite some time.

As it turns out, black holes need not be spherical. If you force them up against an energy boundary they deform. That and they have even less viscosity than liquid helium, which is so thin that it can drip theough the bottom of any possible container.

On a side note, if you know what to look for and weather permitting, the RHIC is one of the few man made object that you can see from the ISS. Contrary to popular belief, the great wall can never be seen from space. Granted, the wall is really freaking long but in reality, it is only about as tall as a four story building.

way we keep expanding our knowledge into areas 'god does not want us to know'. It's a cool finding - just wish there was some way we could project back pre-bang or detect the presence of the universe next door, or find a universe in a black hole or something. Yeah, I know. All a bit silly. But it would be pretty wild to get even a hint of something more...

Not necessarily silly. There's at least one hypothesis that suggests every black hole is a one way ticket to a different universe.

way we keep expanding our knowledge into areas 'god does not want us to know'. It's a cool finding - just wish there was some way we could project back pre-bang or detect the presence of the universe next door, or find a universe in a black hole or something. Yeah, I know. All a bit silly. But it would be pretty wild to get even a hint of something more...

Not necessarily silly. There's at least one hypothesis that suggests every black hole is a one way ticket to a different universe.

Here is what my cut to the chase bottom line position is. Everything is natural, and whatever we discover will be just as natural as what we know now. Our species will most likely go extinct before we discover all there is to know. But the consistent pattern of scientific discovery has lead us from the gaps where humans hit a wall and inserted a god only for the magical explanation to give way to a natural one.

My newest pet argument and I have yet to see a credible counter to it is this?

If one can accept that their is no magic or thought to a hurricane or tornado, then why should what occurred before the big bang be anything but an object itself, like a hurricane or tornado?

It frightens me more to think of a puppeteer pulling the strings to all this as a claim. But being finite in a non cognitive universe is as frightening as the sun rising or taking a dump.

My mortality is as mundane as the death of a maggot and as common as stars. I cannot ultimately escape death. Not even non living objects such as a star or atom continue forever.

The universe is most likely the outcome of prior non cognitive fuels and processes.

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."ObamaCheck out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under BrianJames Rational Poet also on twitter under Brianrrs37

"Gluon Plasma" .................Will you quit giving it new names. We all know what you really mean. Baby batter, jizz, man mayo.

I like to joke at work when the waitresses ask for an English muffin, "Come on, we all know what you really mean".

Nothing to see here, keep moving.

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."ObamaCheck out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under BrianJames Rational Poet also on twitter under Brianrrs37